By the time you read this, it's possible that the frenzied seven days that are New York Fashion Week will be drawing to a close. The savviest of fashionistas will undoubtedly still be glued to Style.com for the news and their favorite insider blogs for the dirt: the models who walk first, the models who trip first, the editor who keeps a designer waiting the longest, and the Hollywood It Girl who causes the biggest stir outside the Bryant Park tents. But second-hand scandal can grow tiresome, and not everyone can afford that $500 skybox ticket to the Zac Posen show that one anonymous invitee was hawking on Craig’s List at press time. The rest of us will have no choice but to seek renewed solace at the newsstands. Every year, the fall-preview fashion glossies look more and more like back-breaking contract-law texts than books about cool clothes, and this September is no different. The summer diet of skimpy resort wear and overpriced gladiator sandals have culminated in a complete fashion binge-fest, with the latest Vogue weighing in at an unmistakably chunky 4.88 lbs. The scales never lie.

While reading the fall rags, it helps to have some sort of navigational tool to aid in the analysis of the crocodile-leather trend, the thousands of advertisements that become indistinguishable from editorial spreads, and the various cover girls frantically promoting their latest film project/tour/television show. What do these elements say about a magazine’s guiding philosophy, its long-term vision, the profound, intense reflections it seeks to impart upon its readers? In the New York City media-hub, an Editrix-in-Chief is required to put in just as much thought into her coiffeurs as a Hollywood celebrity. For one, Anna Wintour’s sleek page-boy has become as synonymous with the Vogue brand as Kate Moss (13 appearances this month alone). So in the interest of all that is fashionably sacred, the Phoenix surveyed the hairstyles sported by the mag-hags who run the show at five magazines to guide us through their September books.

We hope we’ve determined what each editrix’s personal fondness for beachy waves, natural highlights, teased fringes, and sophisticated blow-outs says about their editorial content. But after thumbing through 3044 pages of other-worldly, gazelle-like creatures in fantastically expensive ensembles, perhaps we’re just blinded by our own insecurities. This, clearly, is the ideal state-of-mind in which to make superficial snap-judgments.

Vogue’s Anna Wintour can switch from a prim smile to a sour frown in a nanosecond, and one gets the sense that she’d be perfectly happy to skin newborn kittens for a “chic, domesticated wrap” if Oliver Theyskens told her it was the hottest thing yet for spring. For now, forget the ever-present notion that Wintour is a psycho-bitch, and focus your attention on her personal style. In between micromanaging the Vogue mega brand and torturing her assistants into writing thinly veiled roman à clefs about her management technique, Wintour, similar to her magazine, is precisely, meticulously, painstakingly groomed at all times (there’s a good chance she showers in diamonds and fur). Every blown-out piece of blond hair is perpetually in its place, and somehow, her blunt bangs are never, ever frizzed. There isn’t much that’s ground-breaking this month by way of new designers or faces. Neither, for that matter, is the placement of Wintour’s part. Of course, that does nothing to change the fact that Vogue — like Wintour in her signature polished, chin-length bob — forever remain the Spartan classics of the industry.

The dashing pirate of Providence Casey Dorman of Providence was walking to work on the stone wharfs of Rockport, Massachusetts one day this summer when he crossed paths with Johnny Depp, fresh off another box-office conquest as Captain Jack Sparrow in the latest of the Pirates of the Caribbean series.

Review: For Greater Glory Bring coffee, because director Dean Wright's dramatization of the 3-year-long Cristero War (1926-9) seems to last longer than the Mexican conflict itself.

Beauty boom Human hair grows a measly 1.25 centimeters a month. Boston's beauty scene seems to be growing a helluva lot faster. Here are three local salons expanding their empires this season.

Ocean State Theatre Company’s Rent It may have been a latecomer as a rock musical, arriving 19 years after Hair rattled the boards in 1967, but Rent is overflowing with everything there is to love about both musicals and high-energy music.

A buff Hair hits the Colonial At the close of the second act of last Thursday's performance of Hair , as the cast disrobed, an audience member began yelling loud enough to be heard over the mawkish ensemble number, "Where Do I Go."

Vintage Aquarius Hair co-creator James Rado recalls a shady doc who showed up backstage to give the original cast amphetamine-laced "vitamin shots."

YO, JONNY! THE LOVE SONG OF JONNY VALENTINE | February 05, 2013 Sometime after becoming a YouTube megastar and crashing into the cult of personality that has metastasized in contemporary society, Teddy Wayne's 11-year-old bubblegum idol Jonny Valentine is hanging out in his dressing room getting a blow job from a girl who doesn't even like his music.

LENA DUNHAM AND HBO GET IT RIGHT | April 13, 2012 When a new television show chronicling the lives of young women arrives, it tends to come packaged with the promise that it will expertly define them, both as a generation and a gender.

EUGENIDES'S UPDATED AUSTEN | October 12, 2011 For his long-awaited third novel, Jeffrey Eugenides goes back to look at love in the '80s — and apparently decides that it's a lot like love in the early 19th century.

REVIEW: RINGER | September 08, 2011 Sixty seconds into the CW's new psychological thriller Ringer, star Sarah Michelle Gellar is seen running from a masked attacker in the darkness.

LOVE'S LEXICOGRAPHER | February 10, 2011 As the editorial director at Scholastic, David Levithan is surrounded by emotional stories about adolescents. Being overexposed to such hyperbolic feelings about feelings could easily turn a writer off pursuing such ventures himself — despite the secrets he may have picked up along the way.